Warhorses of Letters
The world's first gay, equine, military, epistolary romance.
Newly discovered letters written from Wellington's warhorse (Marengo) to Napoleon's warhorse (Copenhagen) and vice versa.
Includes extra material not featured in the Radio 4 series, both elements of the letters cut from the final scripts and additional material not featured in the shows at all, including the letters from Marengo to his hygienist and the horse he plays chess with, and the notes between Copenhagen and the annoying dog he has to share a stall with.
Initially written as a series of letters between the authors (each choosing a stretch of the Napoleonic wars between them to examine and write into the most recent letter). They were then performed with great success at the Tall Tales evenings in Kilburn until the letters were picked up by the BBC for broadcast in autumn 2011.
MARIE PHILLIPS is the author of Gods Behaving Badly, which has just been made into a film starring Sharon Stone and Christopher Walken. Her eponymous alter ego is an intellectually ruthless Galway beauty with a frosty heart who discovers and steals the first clue to the whereabouts of the Copenhagen and Marengo letters by shoving it down her cleavage, partly to keep it safe and partly because she knows this is the best way to steal things from the British Library. She can strip the engine of a vintage Benz in six minutes. She has a black belt. It is shiny.
ROBERT HUDSON wrote the novel The Kilburn Social Club. In his other life, he is the truculent, dwarfish, part-time cryptologist and part-time hockey commentator, Dr Robert Hudson PhD, a child prodigy admitted to Apocryphal College, Cambridge, at the age of eight and expelled at the age of seventeen after an unfortunate incident during his search for the wimple of the Virgin Mary. Hudson's cryptographical expertise is much in demand, and he is often called away from his gay horse research to break codes and interpret symbols and stuff.